Review by Booklist Review
Irving's majestic latest, his first since Avenue of Mysteries (2015), is a multigenerational portrait as colorful and varied as it is complex and quirky as it echoes and pays homage to the author's own rich literary history. Adam Brewster was born out of wedlock to his spirited and rebellious mother, Rachel, called LIttle Ray. Named after the rescue ship in Moby-Dick (one of many references to Irving's favorite novel), she is a diminutive ski instructor who refuses to divulge the name of Adam's father. Young Adam sees ghosts, but it is this parental void that truly haunts him. When Adam befriends Elliott Barlow, the new English teacher at Exeter, a snow-shoer of even smaller stature than Little Ray, Adam immediately recognizes the father figure he so desperately needs. Irving infuses the narrative with countless comedic set pieces, some farcical, others wistfully tender. The emotionally resonant result is sweepingly cinematic, reminding the reader that Irving has a screenwriting Oscar. Autobiographical snippets and splashes of brilliance buttress the themes of death and aging, memory and identity, in an elegiac testimony to the many facets of familial love.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Irving's stardom will magnetize fans and all readers seeking a big, immersive novel.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This overblown and underplotted behemoth of a novel from Irving (The World According to Garp) follows the idiosyncratic journey to adulthood of Adam, an illegitimate child born and raised in New England who becomes a writer. The search for Adam's father's identity provides a thriller element, but it never generates much narrative momentum. Dickensian in scope, the book includes multiple story lines, notably the complex love life of Adam's lesbian mother, Little Ray, a ski instructor who marries a man who will identify as a woman. Nora, an outspoken lesbian cousin who's a victim of sexual violence, also plays a significant role. Along the way, Irving chronicles American society from the 1950s to roughly the present, focused on feminism and sexual intolerance. His enormous imagination, his storytelling gifts, and his intelligence are all on display, but this feels more like a coda to his career, if one with a still-resonant theme about family and the maternal relationship: "We're alone in the way we love our mothers, or in the way we don't." Irving's fans may love this, but it's not the place to start for anyone new to his work. Agents: Dean Cooke, Cooke McDermid, and Janet Turnbull, Turnbull Agency. (Oct.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Irving returns with his first novel since 2015's Avenue of Mysteries, calling it his "last long novel." Another semi-autobiographical work, it features Adam Brewster, a wrestler who becomes a novelist/screenwriter growing up in 1950s Exeter, NH. His mother, Rachel (Little Ray) is a ski instructor in Vermont who leaves Adam with his grandmother and aunts in Exeter during ski season. Adam is raised in a sexually and gender-fluid home, unusual for that time. He and other family members see ghosts in their home and elsewhere. In adulthood, Adam searches his young mother's haunts in Aspen to hunt down his biological father. Sections of this novel are in screenplay form, which can feel cumbersome. However, audiences who like to delve into an Irving-esque world will feel quirkily at home. Some sentences, paragraphs, and images are so beautifully poignant that readers will need to pause to breathe and let them soak in. VERDICT Irving is a staunch supporter and frank discusser of sexual minorities, sexual politics, and alternative families; here he handles them with grace and gusto. This time, he layers in skiing lore and ghosts among those core topics, creating a hefty heart-wrenching ghost story and family love story of the sort that only Irving can craft.--Beth Liebman Gibbs
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Familiar Irving themes and autobiographical points mark this sprawling family tale. Narrator Adam Brewster is a lucky bastard. His short and unwed mother, Ray, is gay but marries even shorter Elliot, an English teacher and wrestler at Adam's New Hampshire school, who's fine with Ray living part of the year elsewhere with her female partner, Molly, and will eventually transition genders. At the wedding, Adam hears the epic orgasms experienced by Em, the partner of his cousin Nora. They perform, in some of the novel's best moments, at a comedy club as Two Dykes, One Who Talks, with Nora interpreting Em's pantomime. Adam, seen from childhood to old age, is lucky to be raised and surrounded by women who are smart, loving, and supportive. Still, he spends most of the book trying to find out more about his father, someone Ray met in 1941 when she was a teenager at a hotel in Aspen, Colorado. The likely candidate is an actor whose noir films and off-screen life become a major sidebar. The lost paternity that haunts Adam is reflected in actual ghosts that appear haphazardly throughout the novel, sparking a few comic moments but mainly serving to personify his preoccupation with family history. Like Irving, Adam writes three novels before gaining broad fame with his fourth. Also like Irving, he writes for the movies, and twice the narrative switches to lengthy stretches of screenplay format, bringing a welcome briskness to the generally slow pace. Irving's writing can be painfully plain, short on imagery or elegance and long, oh so long, on repetition. But his imagination and empathy often work to charm a reader when the prose falls short. Here the consistent pleasure is an extended family whose distinctive voices deliver thoughtful messages of tolerance, understanding, and affection for those who are different. A book that will try a reader's patience but may also reward it. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
